There isn’t any obvious way to either see where your low-ass level gang can quest next and there’s also no zone where you can keep grinding to build a few levels before moving on like in a Final Fantasy or something. That means while you have a giant freely accessible map, early encounters in the wrong neighbourhood will kill you dead anyway so there’s still railroading going on.
This was definitely a game design choice and issue for me in DOS (1), but I didn’t feel the same about BG3, it seemed pretty well paced to me